Restoration · October 15, 2026 · EDITORIAL NOTE

Beyond tree counts: what should restoration measure?

Planting is an activity. Recovery needs a baseline, a suitable reference ecosystem and observations over time.

Counting planted trees is useful for recording effort. It cannot, on its own, establish that an ecosystem has recovered. At Mega Forest, our proposed monitoring approach separates what was done from what changed afterward.

The Society for Ecological Restoration’s standards provide a framework for planning and assessing restoration. We use that as a starting point for asking what ecosystem belongs at a site, which pressures caused degradation and what recovery should look like.

A project plan should specify what will be observed: survival, native species composition, habitat structure, invasive cover and other indicators suited to the site. The choice of indicators, sampling method and monitoring period needs to be documented before a result is promoted.

Our position is that biodiversity and living biomass should be considered together, in ecological context. We will not treat an increase in tree cover as an automatic improvement everywhere. Existing habitat and naturally open ecosystems need to be understood before planting is proposed.

This is a monitoring philosophy, not a report of Mega Forest field results. We have not published a restoration dataset here yet.

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